A co-location facility provider (a “provider”) may employ a communication facility, such as a data center or warehouse, in which one or more customers of the provider locate network, server, and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity. Such customers are said to be “co-located” in the co-location facility. Co-location facilities may be shared by the multiple tenants locating networking equipment within the co-location facilities. With IT and communications facilities in safe, secure hands, telecommunications, Internet, application service providers, cloud service providers, content providers, and other providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy less latency and the freedom to focus on their core business. Additionally, customers may reduce their traffic back-haul costs and free up their internal networks for other uses. Customers co-located at a co-location facility typically lease space or storage capacity for a set duration. Assets at a co-location facility, such as cabinets, cages, and ports, may provide customers the leased space or storage capacity.
In some cases, the co-location facility provides network connection services (or “interconnection services”) by which customers of the provider may interconnect to one another over the co-location facility network infrastructure or by which a customer of the provider may interconnect its spatially and/or geographically distributed customer networking equipment over the co-location facility network infrastructure. The co-location facility may in such cases be referred to as an “interconnection facility.” The provider may provide network connection services accessible to co-located customers via an interconnection, such network connection services including, for example, a cloud exchange, a carrier Ethernet exchange, Internet access or connection service, an Internet exchange, a “metro connect” or metro connection service for reaching other communication facilities within a metropolitan area, a cross-connect from one customer to another (e.g., a customer-to-customer interconnection), and other network connection services. An interconnection may in some cases span multiple logical network boundaries defined by networks deployed by multiple different customers of the provider co-located, in some respect, within the co-location facility and including enterprise, managed services provider, network connection service provider, cloud service provider, and service reseller customers, for instance. These various co-location facility customer networks, each of which may make up at least a portion of the interconnection, may employ heterogeneous network equipment and network management technologies and protocols.
To provide network connection services between customer networks, between co-location facilities, to the Internet, etc., co-location facility network infrastructure may have a complex network topology realized using a large number of networking components (e.g., routers, switches, firewalls, and load-balancers) and application servers (e.g., virtual machines, customized applications) that provide application services for identifying, requesting, and configuring network connection services. The network topology is made further complex by the fact that co-location facility providers frequently add new components and new features to the co-location facility network infrastructure to meet the demands of their customers.